6. The Cousins of Willowwood ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Joe’s cousins Vera Fenton and her older sister, Pearl Fenton Clark, who was married to Arthur Clark, spent much of their adult lifetimes living and working in Chicago. Vera, Pearl, and Arthur were in Joe’s mother’s generation. In her youth, Pearl had been considered beautiful, and, now, as a white-haired, older woman, she was regal. Vera had a wonderful sense of humor, which living in the Windy City had refined. Vera was as elegant as Pearl was royal. Arthur typified a Chicago businessman; he was urbane and confident. When they retired, the three returned to Pine Village to live in the house that Pearl and Vera’s father had owned. The sisters’ father was Thomas Eleazer Fenton, the blacksmith who designed the special shoe that transformed the horse Dan Patch into a legendary pacer. Pearl, Vera, and Arthur lived just to the west of the blacksmith shop. In his spare time, Arthur, a skilled artist, liked to paint. His canvas depicting deer in a forest adorned a wall of the living room.

With their earnings from Chicago, the three purchased Willowwood, which was a glorified cabin in the hills and woods near Kramer, only a few miles north of Williamsport, the county seat. Arthur, Pearl, and Vera repaired to Willowwood for several days at a time during the hot summer months. What Willowwood, the small house, lacked in refinement the landscape around it more than compensated in magnificence.

To the north arose a high cliff of crumbly sandstone. The sunshine lit the nearly vertical escarpment a bright yellow with hints of coral pink. Between the crag and the cabin, cottonwoods fluttered their leaves like oversized coins on both sides of a tiny gully that could become a raging rivulet when it rained. Immediately adjacent to the cottonwoods was a bevy of weeping willows, for which the cabin had been named. They draped their long, lithe branches almost to the ground. Strolling among the lime and lemon leaves felt like walking through graceful streamers at a Japanese festival. Surrounding the cabin stood towering pines that kept the cottage in perpetual shade.

Willowwood was close to where the school bus had parked on the 24th of September in 1963 when the fourth and fifth grades had taken a special field trip to see the beaver dam on Big Pine Creek. That day in late autumn had been gray and cold. Robert and his classmates had hiked through a forest and arrived atop a hill commanding an excellent view of the pond the beavers had created. Robert had felt a twinge of disappointment because he had expected to see beavers, resembling the animated versions in Saturday morning cartoons. There had been no beavers that day because they work at night. Even with no animals in sight, Robert had appreciated the opportunity to take a close look at what the animals had built. Constructed of mud mixed with twigs, their dam had crossed the creek and had reached a height of six feet or more. On the dry slope of the dam, hundreds of branches and numerous trunks of trees as big around as stovepipes had been piled. Robert had been impressed with the orderliness, for the branches and trees had been aligned vertically—not strewn haphazardly. In the middle of the pond, the beavers’ lodge could be seen: a mound of sticks protruding above the deep reservoir. When Robert had played in the mud near the barn after a spring storm, he had used a small shovel to dig a channel no wider than three or four inches where the water was the deepest, needing little encouragement to form a small stream headed toward the meadow. Then he had attempted to build a dam across the channel. The water kept tearing away his preliminary work. When he finally resorted to dropping a large shovelful of soil squarely over the stream and had stepped on the dirt to make it stay put, the water immediately went around one end. Beavers were experts, Robert had decided when the field trip had ended and everyone was climbing aboard the bus for the return trip to school.   

On a sunny June day—the exact opposite of the overcast day when Robert had studied the beaver dam—Joe and Ida took the boys to visit Arthur, Pearl, and Vera at Willowwood. The three greeted the family at the door to the little house.

Ida said, “Charles and Robert, you may entertain yourselves by the cliff, and we’ll call you when it’s time to eat.”

Charles and Robert were happy to be excused, although they would not have minded listening to the adults’ conversation, which was sure to roam through stories about the olden days. The boys lingered in the cool shade of the pines, examining cones that left a sticky tar on their fingers. Charles showed Robert how the cone protected the seeds. Next, they passed through the grove of willows with its spongy, sun-dappled floor. As no water was running through the rill, they found tufts of dried sedge where they could place their feet and cross the muddy streamlet. Now they stood before the cliff. They looked up, admiring its height. They wanted to climb the sheer face, but to scale more than eight or ten feet upward was impossible. They balanced like goats on small projections as high as they could go without losing their footing.

Robert was amazed to find tiny snail shells, which seemed to him to be so foreign as to belong in a different part of the world. Each was perfectly formed. They were empty, and he found—quite by accident—that some of the smallest ones could be crushed with very little pressure between the thumb and forefinger. As he wanted to take them home, he tried not to flatten them into minuscule shards.

When the brothers returned to the level ground, Robert searched for a chunk of sandstone that he could pocket for his collection. At home, he had a shoebox with stones lining the bottom. He had found them wherever the family went, and they reminded him of the places Joe, Ida, Charles, and he had visited. Robert crouched down to lift a triangular piece of sandstone from the sandy, pebbly soil near the rivulet. He liked the granular feel of the rock, which he put in the pocket of his tan shorts—first making certain that his shells were in the opposite pocket!

Just then, Ida called for the boys to come to “dinner,” the midday meal.

When the boys entered through the screen door, Arthur and Joe were discussing the Battle of Kickapoo, which had been fought on the 1st of June in 1791. The battlefield was between Williamsport and Independence.

“The battle took place not too far from the falls on Kickapoo Creek,” Arthur said.

Robert knew where Kickapoo Falls was. Joe had taken the boys to see it, even though the site was on private property. The somber cliff stood in a dense forest. The rocky cleft loomed up from the shadows and impressed Robert’s young imagination as ancient and elemental, as if Titans had fought there. Joe had warned the boys not to circle around to the top of the falls, as Charles had suggested. With his fear of heights, Robert had felt considerable relief.

“Warrenton, which had been planned as the county seat, was near there,” Arthur added.

“Is there anything left of Warrenton?” Joe asked.

“Not that I know of,” Arthur said.

“Doubtlessly, you are aware that another Indian battle took place in 1822,” Joe offered.

“Refresh my memory,” Arthur said.

“After the Battle of Tippecanoe, unrest persisted, and the government conducted what might be called ‘clean-up operations’ in Indiana, even after statehood,” Joe explained. “Groups of Kickapoo and Potawatomie Indians lost a battle in 1822. As I understand, it took place near Warrenton. That was only four years before my ancestors began felling trees for their farm south of Pine Village.”

“We’re going to eat now,” Ida suggested.

Ida had helped Pearl and Vera prepare chicken salad sandwiches and lemonade.

Vera, who always took an interest in what the boys did, asked Charles and Robert, “Were you having fun while we were talking about battles?”

“I found snail shells,” Robert said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful to show Vera.

“Those are lovely!” she exclaimed.

“And I found a rock,” Robert said, while he carefully replaced the shells and transferred his hand to his other pocket, pulling out the sandstone.

“I find the color almost pink, don’t you?” Vera said.

“Yes,” Robert said, “especially when the sun shines on the rock.”

“My, it’s a hot day!” Ida said.

“We can better appreciate the shade of the pines on a day like this,” Pearl said.

“I would rather be a little too warm than to be freezing in air conditioning,” Vera said.

Robert hadn’t even noticed that it was hot out. He wondered why the adults thought it was such a hot day.

Experiencing Nature in Warren County, Indiana 6 (Last Installment in This Series)

It’s odd how the memory works. When I was in high school, I parked my 1953 Packard along Old 55 and took a short walk down a narrow stream that fed Big Pine Creek nearby. It was noon on a summer’s day. The red-winged blackbirds were trilling. The general buzz of insect life was less along the water than in the meadows above, and I heard the water trickling around smooth stones.

The Tranquility of a Stream

Drawing by Bruce Crane (1857–1937)

Engraved by John Sanderson Dalziel (1839–1937)

In The Closing Scene

Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1887

The colors in the stream bed were magnificent: pale green rocks within a setting of vibrant ocher and tan. I was surprised but not scared when I detected the tail of a blue racer snake as it hid from me in the sedge. Higher up the bank, monarch and black swallowtail butterflies visited the tall flowers of the old meadows. The stretches of pebbly earth beside the water twinkled with cabbage, sulphur, and alfalfa butterflies. An occasional dragonfly buzzed past, as if on a mission.   

I recall feeling at peace with the earth. The sensation was profound. It endured for the interval of time that I was strolling near the water. The drifting clouds in the bright azure sky accompanied me both above and in reflection while I took a few steps and paused to appreciate a wildflower before taking a few more steps and pausing again.

Since that summer’s day years ago, I have met celebrities, toured historical sites, visited great cities, and crossed the ocean, but none of the memories that I have made while engaged in these later activities have been as sharply detailed, as deeply engraved, and as often revisited as my recollection of the tributary to Big Pine Creek in my hometown. When I parked my car that day, I had no intention of making a mental archive of details that I would examine again and again for decades, but a treasury of a fleeting moment was stored in my mind forever.

During the harrowing events of life later on, the memory of looking closely at an often overlooked section of a stream has helped restore tranquility in the midst of chaos.

Whenever the author and editor William Dean Howells broke in a new ink pen, he wrote the name of his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio. One of America’s literary giants, Howells published 35 novels, 35 plays, 34 miscellaneous books, 6 books of literary criticism, 4 books of poetry, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. He shaped the destiny of fellow writers by editing their work for The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. In his book titled A Boy’s Town (1890), Howells wrote that Hamilton “was a town peculiarly adapted for a boy to be a boy in.” Although Howells lived and worked in Boston and New York, as well as having served as a consul in Venice, his pleasant upbringing in Hamilton was his foundation. While I remember the tiny stream that flowed into Big Pine Creek, I understand why Howells wrote the name “Hamilton” as naturally as he took his next breath.